A College Dropout, an Ex-Investment Banker, a Guy With a 28-Bedroom Mega-Villa: Meet Crypto's Newly Minted Billionaires

[Celerity]

The Bullish and Circle IPOs minted a bunch of new billionaires this summer. The president is raking it in too.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/crypto-newly-minted-billionaires

https://archive.ph/EiLlO


Team Bullish rings the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

In 2025, crypto holdings reportedly account for anywhere between 10% to nearly all of Donald Trump’s wealth, a truly wild turn of events given that (1) he spent most of his adult life associated with the real estate and entertainment industries, and (2) he once claimed digital assets were “based on thin air” and called Bitcoin a “scam.” Now the president is all in, hosting meme coin dinners, launching NFT collections, signing executive orders to allow crypto in 401(k)s, and announcing plans to create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile.” (Meanwhile, Trump’s non-financial-adviser adult sons are urging every “average American” to “buy as much [bitcoin] as you can.”) In response, Senate Democrats have introduced the End Crypto Corruption Act, the purpose of which, per cosponsor Mark Kelly, is to “make it illegal for the President and other government officials to make a profit from crypto assets.”

But the president of the United States and his family aren’t the only ones making huge sums of money from the crypto world. According to Forbes, there are now more than a dozen crypto billionaires. Thanks to extremely lucrative initial public offerings, three new crypto billionaires have been minted this month alone.

One of those is Brendan Blumer, whose 30.1% stake in crypto exchange Bullish, which went public in mid-August, put Blumer’s holdings at around $2.8 billion. (Bullish’s former parent company was Block.one, which has been described as a “bit of a pariah in the crypto world” and in which billionaire venture capitalist and JD Vance-benefactor Peter Thiel was an investor.) Iowa-raised Blumer got his start “selling in-game digital assets for online games including World of Warcraft” at the age of 15, according to Bloomberg. Later, he moved to Hong Kong, and in 2020, gave up his US citizenship. According to Mansion Global, in March—before he became a billionaire, but when he was apparently already extremely rich—Blumer bought a 28-bedroom Sardinian estate for a record-breaking $172 million. Also adding three commas to his net worth via the Bullish IPO is Kokuei Yuan, who holds a 26.7% stake in the company. Far less is known about Yuan, who, according to Bloomberg, graduated from Tufts with degrees in economics and studio art, once worked as an investment banker at CLSA, and cofounded Okay.com, a property firm, with Blumer. His stake worth in Bullish is approximately $2.5 billion.

When stablecoin platform Circle Internet Group Inc—which sounds remarkably like the name of some circa 1990 internet company—went public in June, cofounder Jeremy Allaire saw his net worth hit more than $1.7 billion. Allaire, a graduate of Macalester College, who has been founding online companies for the last 30-something years—and helped Noam Chomsky set up a website to archive his correspondence—has called crypto a “purple issue,” politically. In January, Circle donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee; in July, he was at the White House when Trump signed the GENIUS Act, a crypto regulatory bill, into law.

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[Hugin]

1. Yeah, yeah... People talk about tulips.

This crapto goat rodeo reminds me more of the dot.com fizzle. Which, none of these people were around to participate in, in any meaningful manner. It totally figures that the Titanic Tito is leading the charge into oblivion.

I did get sucked into the dot.com massacre, if only to say, "Wait! No! Stop!" I was scarred anyway. Forever labeled a luddite by those forgotten by history.

Well, at least we had some bedazzled purses to show for our trouble.